Author: CCW

“These are they which came out of great tribulation”

November is the grey month of remembering. Leaves lie scattered on the wind in piles of burnished gold and red, redolent with the smell of decay. Scattered leaves in a culture of scattered minds. And as if in testimony to the pathetic fallacy in which we attribute human emotions to the natural world, there is no end to doom and gloom in our human world that nature seems to mirror. The spectacle of the shootings at the synagogue in Pittsburgh is still fresh in our minds. And then there is all of the folly and frenzy, the fun and frolic of Halloween in our secular and commercial culture. I don’t know exactly what to make of it. I don’t quite understand why one would want to be frightened or to frighten others and while I get the whole matter of costumes and masks, I am uneasy about ‘trick or treat.’ What does it teach? To be a jihadi or a beggar? Just not sure.

Yet as the counter to these features of the dark of nature’s year and the darkness in the heart of our world, there is the wonderful mystery of All Saints’ which provides a powerful way for us to think more deeply and more spiritually about our humanity as gathered to God in whom we find our real truth and dignity. All Saints’ reminds us of our Christian vocation. It is to a sanctified life which is simply about the qualities of Christ living in us in and through our lives with one another.

All Saints’ recalls us to the Communion of Saints, to the idea of our humanity united through its true forms of diversity in the praise and worship of God. In the culture of scattered leaves and scattered souls, there is a gathering. It is to God and it is God in us. The great lesson from Revelation affords us a vision of heaven. It is not future so much as it is present. It is about the truth of our lives as gathered to God and to the qualities of grace that properly define our humanity. All Hallows’ Eve is not about ghouls and ghosts, of horror and gruesome images of our humanity in disorder and disarray, dismembered and ghastly; it is about the dignity of our humanity as found in God through the truer forms of our humanity. “A multitude that no man could number,” Revelation says, a multitude composed of“nations, kindred, people and tongues.” In other words, a multitude that embraces the legitimate diversities of our humanity in relation to cultures and nations, families and people, different languages and ethnicities. A vision that takes us beyond the tribalisms of our communities and churches and that recalls us to the communion of saints. Our lives are grounded in God and not simply in the accidentalities of time and history, of culture and experience.

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“He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me”

There is something wonderfully providential about the concurrence of The Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude with The Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity. On the one hand, we have the wonderful vision in the lesson from Revelation of the heavenly city that anticipates the great spiritual harvest Festival of All Saints and, in the Gospel, grounds that heavenly vision in the life of the Trinity. The spiritual fellowship belonging to the redeemed human community is grounded in the life of God through his Word and Spirit. On the other hand, in the Gospel for Trinity Twenty-Two, we have the powerful yet instructive parable of the unforgiving servant which illustrates by way of the negative the whole point of having and keeping the commandments of Christ, namely, our abiding in the very love of God and acting out of that love towards one another. That is the very thing that the servant who is forgiven and indeed has been forgiven much doesn’t do towards others. With the words of forgiveness still ringing in his ears, he refuses to forgive others what little they owe to him. It is a refusal of love, of mercy and truth. Yet what is wanted, as the epistle reading from Philippians makes clear, is that our “love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgement.” That love is found in Christ and Christ in us; in short, it makes us part of a company of love.

Today’s Scripture readings remind us wonderfully of another kingdom, the kingdom of God. It is another city, the heavenly city, the City of God, which stands in such stark contrast to the disorders and confusions of our contemporary world, the city of man, as it were, the “unreal city” as T.S. Eliot suggests in The Waste Land. The Unreal City is the human community as more dead than alive, an image that follows immediately upon the image of the Church as nothing more than “a heap of broken images” because it no longer lives from God’s word. Yet these readings remind us of the apostolic fellowship of the Church which, if it is to be the Church, must stand upon the authority of God’s Word. “Only/ there is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),” as Eliot’s poem argues, signalling the only hope in the modern wasteland, the hope that is grounded upon the rock that is Christ and upon the apostolic foundations of the Church. This is what we celebrate today.

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